Tuesday, February 16, 2016

A Night at the Opera: Mozart Meets Salvador Dalí in The Magic Flute

I went to
the opera this past weekend, trying to absorb a bit of “kulcha.” It was the
perfect production for movie-mad me, one that wed the magic of Mozart’s music
to some fancy-pants cinematography, in which live performers constantly
interacted with animated images of which Salvador Dalí might have been proud.
Dalí, the Spanish surrealist with the weirdly upturned mustache, of course
tried his own hand at moviemaking. Back in 1929, he and countryman Luis Buñuel
collaborated on a short, silent film, Un
Chien Andalou, that featured bizarre images like the slicing open of a
woman’s eye with a razor blade. Much later, Dalí actually worked with the artists
at Walt Disney Animation on a short project, Destino, that was finally finished and released (and Oscar
nominated) in 2003, fifteen years after his death.

Mozart’s The Magic Flute is an opera full of mystery and magic: it boasts
such neverlandish elements as a giant serpent, a wizard, an antic bird-catcher,
and a dangerous Queen of the Night. It’s chockful of symbolism reminiscent of
Masonic ritual, and the basic plotline doesn’t make any sort of real sense. In
1975, the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman directed a full-length TV
version of the opera that was more or less traditional in its staging.More than thirty years later, Kenneth Branagh
attempted to give the filmed opera a more 20th century context. But the
current production I saw at LA Opera is distinctive in taking its cues from the
silent movie era, thanks to the work of a British team (Suzanne Andrade and Paul
Barritt) who call themselves 1927, in
reference to the year when talking pictures first made their Hollywood debut.
Their mandate is to enhance stage productions by way of film.

In their
version of The Magic Flute,
characters seem spawned by silent movies. The heroine, Pamina, has the dark bob
of Louise Brooks. The comic bird-catcher Papageno looks and moves a lot like that
sad-faced clown, Buster Keaton. The slave Monostatos, with his creepy bald head
and elongated fingers, seems borrowed from the classic German horror film, Nosferatu. And the live singers make
their entrances and exits through doors in a huge screen on which are projected
images both happy (butterflies, fairies, rosy-red hearts) and disturbing
(spiders, skulls, flying monkeys, staring eyes, giant hands). There are
ominous-looking clocks and giant gears too, for a trendy steampunk effect. The
challenge for the performers is to coordinate their movement with the screen
images: shooting at the hearts to make them disappear, being chased by huge
animated hounds, riding on the back of a very strange pink elephant with
human-style legs.

Those
elephants, in particular, made me think of the freakiest scene in any Disney
movie, the “Pink Elephants on Parade” number from Dumbo (1941), which simulates the effects of alcohol on a small,
confused circus animal. (Those Disney animators, no strangers to drink
themselves, must have had a ball with that one!) The visual oddities in the
stage presentation also are certainly reminiscent of what the Disney folks did
with offbeat visuals in the still-remarkable Fantasia (1940).

This Magic Flute also has an undersea segment
featuring an Esther Williams parade of giant squids and other strange, watery
critters. It brings to mind an animated feature that dates back to the heady
(oh so heady!) Sixties. Yellow Submarine ,
with its parade of weird and wonderful fishies, is still one of my favorite
animated films. Whenever I watch it, it makes me feel young again, as did my
most recent night at the opera.

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About Me

As someone who has always been passionate about language, I prefer good conversation to, well, just about anything. And for me chatting about movies is a special treat. I’m convinced that movies can shape lives. On this topic I’ve got some great stories to tell, and I invite YOU to share your own. But because I’m a show biz survivor, I will also sometimes pull back the curtain to show you the inner workings of the film industry. Read, and enjoy!